Bone to Ash

The narrow counterspell with a consolation prize attached. The lineage runs through the long blue tradition of paying a premium to make a hard answer feel less like a dead draw: where Counterspell stops anything for two mana, this restricts the target to creature spells and charges double, then refunds the tempo loss with a fresh card. That tradeoff is the whole design logic. A four-mana counter that only hits creatures is a poor rate by raw efficiency, but the attached draw turns every successful cast into a guaranteed two-for-one: a stopped threat plus a card. The restriction is real and it bites. Against a creatureless deck there is no legal target, so the card simply sits in hand; the cantrip only fires once a creature spell is on the stack to counter. The mana cost and the scope are what buy the card advantage, and the floor it offers is conditional on the opponent actually committing a creature. This is the family of conditional counters that trade Counterspell's universal flexibility for a built-in payoff against the right archetype, a philosophy blue revisits whenever it wants creature-heavy environments to have interaction that pays for itself. The instant timing matters more than the rate suggests: held up across the turn, it punishes the opponent's biggest creature commitment while keeping your own card economy whole.